thoughts and views on the evolving cloud

Nexus 7000 Secret Decoder Ring

A common problem in designing Nexus 7000 installations is identifying what features are supported with which linecard. Many people are accustomed to the Catalyst 6500 where all of the features are primarily driven from the supervisor while the linecards have limitations of scale. With the Nexus 7000, the features are heavily dependent upon the linecard as the Nexus 7000 is a pure distributed forwarding switch.See Tim Stevenson’s excellent hardware architecture overview of the Nexus 7000 in this year’s Cisco Live presentation BRKARC-3470.

A good understanding of the differences in features is that the classic “M” series is for multiservice solutions like OTV, LISP, and MPLS while the “F” series will be leveraged for access layer enhancements like low port to port latency, FCoE, Fabric Path and Fabric Extenders (FEX).

Hope this helps.

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